Washington, D.C., Nov. 29, 2011—It has been well documented that the future of our nation's Latino male college student population is in peril. Postsecondary attendance and attainment numbers for Latino males continue to decline relative to their female peers. Unfortunately, this crisis has largely gone underexamined and unacknowledged by policymakers and education leaders. To help avoid the impending implications that are sure to come in response—along with safeguarding the future economic prosperity of America and securing the well-being of our rapidly growing Latina/o communities—the Institute for Higher Education Policy’s (IHEP) Pathways to College Network today introduced a “Blueprint for Action” to provide model program examples and action steps to best support Latino males to and through college and into the workforce.
The blueprint was released in a new brief, Men of Color: Ensuring the Academic Success of Latino Males in Higher Education, and it addresses three main stages:
- Planning and Development: Actions to take in the initial program development stage;
- Resource Development and Sustainability: Select steps needed to create a strong financial base and sustainable resources for continued work; and
- Outreach and Communications: Points of importance to sustain community buy-in and subsequent efforts to reverse the educational trends of Latino males.
“While research on Latino males is limited and only points to the many challenges facing them, there exist a few promising practices that promote these students’ advancement in education—all the way from elementary to secondary and through postsecondary,” said IHEP President Michelle Asha Cooper, Ph.D. “We present real-life interventions that can be taken advantage of today to help strengthen the educational success for all Latino males.”
Men of Color: Ensuring the Academic Success of Latino Males in Higher Education was written by Victor B. Sáenz, Ph.D., assistant professor of higher education administration at the University of Texas at Austin, and Luis Ponjuan, Ph.D., assistant professor of higher education at the University of Florida. The brief is the first in a publication series focusing on “men of color” in higher education; a population on which IHEP’s Pathways to College Network and several of its partners have been shedding much needed light.
The Pathways to College Network is an alliance of national organizations that advance college opportunity for underserved students by raising public awareness, supporting innovative research, and promoting evidence-based policies and practices across the K-12 and higher education sectors. It promotes the use of research-based policies and practices, the development of new research that is both rigorous and actionable, and the alignment of efforts across middle school, high school, and higher education in order to promote college access and success for underserved students.
To download a free copy of Men of Color: Ensuring the Academic Success of Latino Males in Higher Education or to learn more about IHEP and its other programmatic efforts helping to increase college access and success for underserved student populations, visit the organization’s Web site at www.ihep.org. Additional details about the Pathways to College Network may be found at www.pathways.net.